Friday, July 16, 2004

Movie Review: "The Home Teachers" (2004)

Before I give out my review let me tell you how I got the DVD. I was walking down The Angeles public market one day near Plaridel to shop for some DVDs. This has become a regular ritual for me since I bought my DVD player. I actually enjoy "hunting" for rarities and old favorites more than watching them at home and realizing that they suck. Anyways I was thumbing through some dvd cases..you know the usual Troy, was there, Starship Troopers 2, My Wife was a Gangster 2 and then... I stopped. I couldn't believe it. They had Halestorm's "The Home Teachers".What was a "Mormon-genre movie" doing in this part of this predominantly Islam section of the market? Did they accidentally pick up a copy of the original and make hundreds of pirated copies and put a copy in my hands in a serendipitous twist of fate?Needless to say, I bought it. The Home Teachers is the story of two members an Elders Quorum class that couldn't be more different from each other but nevertheless, were assigned together as hometeaching companions. Greg (Michael Birkeland) is a father of three and can't live without football, so he watches it every Sunday after church. Nelson (Jeff Birk)is a scriptures-on-CD salesman who can't live for the next month without getting 100% hometeaching. The two clash heads , encounter gnomes, mooseheads and destroy toilets for the next six hours trying to get to the three families assigned to them and complete their home teaching assignments. A lot of the laughs in this movie are obviously intended for Mormons, so it would probably leave a lot of non-members stumped. The influence of Farelly brothers comedy is very evident in this one. Although they really needed to tone down on the toilet humor so as not to offend their target audience. It starts out hilarious but the pace kinda gets a little slow in the middle, like the scene with the escaped convicts in the Winnebago and the conversation in the police car trip back to Salt Lake which was set to probably give more depth to the characters. The "Your Not Alone" song sequence was probably given a lot of thought for a long time, but just came flat out corny. All in all it was better than The Singles Ward. Its nice to know that Kurt Hale and his team are getting the hang of mixing madness and Mormonism...but it still needs more improvement.